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Monday, March 1, 2004
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Many Hundreds of Thousands Creating Daily Content?
The Pew Center's survey report, Content Creation Online,
is getting headlines and blog blurbs like "44% of U.S. Internet users
have contributed their thoughts and their files to the online world,"
but it will take me a while to get around to making sense of the details in the actual
report. A lot of the 53 million people in question are posting photos and music files,
which may not be personal creations. They probably don't contribute much
to the "public sphere," even if they do contribute a great deal to
information-sharing within families and among friends.
At first glance, I suspect a lot of blogging (or journalism) about
the report will miss the "methodology" section, particularly the possibly
significant dates of the main research -- conducted almost a
year ago, before Howard Dean put campaign-weblogging in the public eye.
(Yes, blogs have been around much longer, but I suspect the word really got out in the past year.)
"Telephone
interviews were conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates
between March 12 and March 19 and then from April 29-May 20, 2003 among
a sample of 2,515 adults, 18 and older. " [ref]
Here's Pew's own press release, which uses that "44%... have contributed" line as its headline, and follows it with:
"More than 53 million American adults have used
the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post
pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of
content available online."
Here's the Associated Press story based on it:
"Despite the potential of turning every Internet user into a
publisher, relatively few have created Web journals called blogs and
even fewer do so with regularly, a new study finds."
I suspect that some bloggers will read that choice of angle as "old
media" looking to malign the new participatory journalism of blogging.
I'd say it's really just the eternal search for an "out of the ordinary
(ooo)" angle. If the current buzz is that "blogging is the next big
thing," then the "ooo" angle is "Not so big after all!"
Here's what the report's own summary says (highlighting added):
The Pew Internet
Project has asked in its surveys at various times during 2003 and early
2004 about blogging. Those polls of Internet users have shown that
somewhere between 2% and 7% of American Internet users have created
blogs and about 11% of Internet users are blog readers. These are not
hugely impressive figures, but they are hardly trivial. They mean that
anywhere from 3 million to nearly 9 million Americans have created
these diaries.
Some people taking the survey might have balked at the
word "weblog" for one reason or another. Elsewhere in the 16-page
report, there's an estimate that 15 million
Americans have some kind of website, and that 28% of them "freshen the
content" at least once a week, 4% "several times a day." I
haven't gone off to crunch a lot of these numbers myself, but even a
casual (conservative?) look would put that at 600,000 very active Web writers.
That might not
sound like a huge number the way people like to throw around stats in the millions. However, consider that there
are fewer than 1,500 daily newspapers
in the country. Those include small dailies that would be lucky to
have a few dozen writers, including the ones cranking out obits,
wedding announcements and the school lunch menu
columns. So that unimpressive 600,000 daily Web writers is about 400 for every
newspaper, maybe 10 amateurs to every professional journalist.
Unfortunately, the "never screw up on a slow news day" rule applied to
the Sunday release of the Pew report -- which the Associated Press put on
the wire with no mention of the total number of Internet users, just a
lame observation that "relatively few" are active bloggers. That
should have set a huge red flag waving over editors' heads, saying
"relative to what?"
The sloppiness is inexcusable, even though the timing of
this story coincided with the second-string Sunday shift. On a weekday,
I like to think more editors would have caught the missing
total-Web-users figure and sent the writer back to the Pew report (or at
least the Pew press release!) for details. At
least some wire desks corrected a typo in the lead, changing "regularly" to
"regularity." (CNN, Editor & Publisher, etc.) But even they still
didn't bother to insert a total to put that "relatively few" in
perspective. Dumb!
The Pew study itself is still worth a look. So is Precision Journalism,
a book those professionals on the wire desks should have read years
ago to learn how to handle polls and statistics... It's also available
in old-fashioned print
once again, after being online-only for a few years. Come to think of it, I should read it again myself.
I've probably
misplaced a decimal point or made some other terrible mistake in this
little essay myself, trying to write it with half my brain while the other
half was learning some scripting tricks in an MIT classroom. If you see
where I've gone wrong, add a comment...
Coincidentally, my RSS aggregator brought in several other items about
online communication today, included below with little or no editing by
me:
1:13:56 PM 
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Online Publishing and Libel Insurance.
In many ways, online publishers face even greater liability risks than
traditional media. Most, for instance, do not have attorneys standing
ready to review potentially defamatory stories in advance of
publication, as many offline publications do. The need to publish in
"Internet time" further increases the risks for online
publishers. By Michael Rothberg, with Bloggers Are Liable for Libel Suits by Sam Byassee. [Online Journalism Review]
J.D. Lasica Posts Book Outline.
Online journalist J.D. Lasica is writing a book about the clash between
entertainment companies and online technologies, from file-sharing to
"participatory media." He recently posted the outline with a request for feedback. "My initial impression is that this will be a terrific read,"says Dan Gillmor's eJournal
12:46:48 PM
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Got a Book in You?
Traditional booksellers and publishers are exploring print-on-demand
("P.O.D.") self-publishing. This inheritor of the vanity press and
survivor of the dot-com implosion, makes it feasible - technologically
and economically - to produce one copy of a book. Pioneers include
Random House, Barnes & Noble and now Borders. By Gayle Feldman. [New York Times: Technology]
(Note: Besides new authors self-publishing, see what Brewster Kahle has done with his Internet Archive Bookmobile project and copyright-free books.)
Domain Names Are Big Again.
Dot-com domain names are fetching respectable prices again, after more
than three years of attracting scant interest. Some are crossing the
million-dollar threshold. By Bob Tedeschi. [New York Times: Technology]
12:43:18 PM
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Extra! Extra! Read All About You.
Most newspapers have given up the idea of charging money to view their
websites. Increasingly, however, they're asking readers to provide
personal information in exchange for their content. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]
12:37:01 PM
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© Copyright
2008
Bob Stepno.
Last update:
7/19/08; 12:54:02 PM.
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